Gears of the City

by Felix Gilman

  “I have no idea. “

  “You must. You were there for weeks.”

  “I ended up there by mistake. I know almost nothing about the place. It wasn’t very nice.”

  “What are the Hollows?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What do you know about their war?”

  “What war?”

  “Don’t tell me you don’t know about their war.”

  “They weren’t at war.”

  “But they will be. You must know that. I refuse to believe you went there without doing any research. Stop lying to me.”

  “What war? Turnbull, what happens to them?”

  “Why don’t you tell me?”

  At night Arjun dismantled the typewriter and the furniture to make approximations of crowbars and chisels, and worked on the window-bars. The moon was full and the sky was full of stars, and there were people working late in offices across the street, but they didn’t see him waving, or if they did they didn’t care. The pigeons on the windowsill resented him. The Mountain was distant, here— just a thin starless spike on the horizon. The bars didn’t give.

  St. Loup paced.

  “What were you doing there? Why there, of all places? It’s a backwater. We all overlooked it. What drew you there?”

  “I was lost.”

  “Hmm. You know, we all noticed your absence at the Hotel. You left without so much as a note, which I consider bad manners, especially since you and I had been such close allies once. People asked questions. A lot of people assumed you were dead. Some accused me of foul play I said you’d simply wandered off somewhere, the way you always used to, you’d heard of a new choir or orchestra or a new bird with a particularly pretty song or something and gone chasing music. God. Whatever. Is that what happened?”

  “More or less.”

  “Maybe. Or maybe you learned something that actually matters. You always were a secretive type. You always did have more courage than sense. Did you try for the Mountain?”

  “Not yet. I’m not ready yet.”

  “Because you see, Arjun, we questioned some of your associates. We tracked you down to that Fosdyke place because of a newspaper story about the incident at the Fosdyke Museum, and we tracked you to your bolt-hole the old-fashioned way: bribery, threats. It wasn’t all that hard. The locals seemed to be under the impression that you had come down to them from the Mountain.”

  “They’re superstitious. They blame everything on the Mountain. They’re almost as bad as us.”

  “Hmm.”

  St. Loup paced. One of the thugs—the one dressed as a janitor—watched him intently. The other stared blankly out of the window.

  “Turnbull was asking me about the war. “

  “Yes. The war. One of a number of oddities about that place, that time. What about it?”

  “Some of the people there were kind to me. I want to know what happens.”

  “Bad news for them, I’m afraid. Shortly after we picked you up and we pulled you out, there’s what appears to be the most appalling war. Bombs. Ruins. Starvation. Collapse of whatever passes for government there. The whole horrible show.”

  “Why? How?”

  “No idea. We searched in all the usual libraries. You know the places. The ones that cater to our peculiar demands. The best libraries, the deepest networks. But we could find no news of that district past the first few days of the bombing. Airships. An unknown enemy. Why? Who knows? History does not record. A cul-de-sac in Time, an appendix. That part of the city ends there. The city continues elsewhere. Who cares? It’s just statistics; everything is always ending somewhere. It never would have occurred to us to explore in that direction had you not tipped me off. Had we not chanced to meet. But here’s the remarkable thing. As you get closer and closer to that moment, that fracture, that particular end of the city, it becomes harder and harder to travel. Maybe you noticed. For me the key was always lights, beauty; for you it was music. Both are in short supply at the end. The doors are locked, one by one, as the hours go by. Which is why we came late, unfortunately; we would rather have joined you at the Museum.”

  “What happens to them, St. Loup?”

  “I don’t know. That part of the city seems to separate itself from the Metacontext. As if the war cuts it free. It’s very odd. After those first few days no news escapes, and no traveler who has visited has returned. How is this possible? Well, I was hoping you could tell me.”

  “Turnbull seemed to have a theory …”

  “He did?”

  “I don’t know. He seemed to have a theory about it, something to do with the Mountain.” Arjun improvised: “He was asking a lot of questions about the weather.”

  “What? Why?”

  “I don’t know, St. Loup. You’ll have to ask him.”

  Turnbull stood with his hands folded behind his back. There was just one thug in the room, the janitor. Turnbull himself appeared to be fidgeting behind his back with a weapon.

  “What’s on the Mountain, Arjun?”

  “I don’t know any more than you, Turnbull.”

  “It’s so close, there, in that place where we found you. You were there for ages. You must have seen something.”

  “Go yourself. “

  “I’m not ready. Not ready yet. Why do you want to go to the Mountain, if you don’t know what’s there?”

  “I’ve told you this before, Turnbull. My God is there.”

  “How do you know, if you don’t know what the Mountain is?”

  “I don’t know. I believe. I don’t have any other choice.”

  “I know what the Mountain is, Arjun.”

  “No one knows.”

  “It’s nothing. Just rock. Just black rock. It isn’t the seat of the Gods, it isn’t paradise. God isn’t there, whatever silly little thing you call God isn’t there either. St. Loup’s palace of beautiful women, Potocki’s perfect machine, none of it. It’s just rock. A million tons of nothing of significance. It isn’t the heart of the city in any sense except that that’s where it happens to sit. We’ve woven the most ridiculous delusions around it.”

  “Maybe that’s true. I don’t know.”

  “You know, for years I was like you, Arjun. I didn’t earn my title dishonestly. I was a very devout and humble reverend. It only slowly became apparent to me that there was no God, and the Mountain, which the nuns at school had always assured me was His Holy Seat, was empty. It was a painful realization. In fact I was in the process of committing suicide when Shay first found me and retained my services. He pulled me from the gas-filled car. He never tired of reminding me that I owed him my life. But we all must face the truth sooner or later. There is nothing there. I must find the way to the Mountain so that I can show the city: there is nothing there. Nothing. You can be liberated from that obsession of yours. You can give up. You can be free. Wouldn’t that be a relief?”

  “It might. It certainly might.”

  “Give me some straight answers, then. Help me. Better me than St. Loup, wouldn’t you agree? In our different ways we are both men of religion. St. Loup is a sensualist, he’d turn the Mountain into a brothel. Let’s begin again: who owns the Combines?”

  “I already told St. Loup …”

  “What? What did you tell him?”

  “… Nothing. I told him I don’t know anything.”

  “No. You were about to say something else. What did you tell him?”

  “Nothing. I’m sick of both of you. Ask him.”

  St. Loup was drunk. His sunglasses were pushed back on his head. He staggered and fell into a chair. He held out a bottle of something yellow that smelled like whiskey. It had what appeared to be an extraordinarily tiny human fetus floating in it. “Drink?”

  “No thank you. “

  “Hotel’s rarest stock. Thousand-year-old vintage. Only a hundred bottles made before the mob hanged the brewer. Hung? Hanged.”

  “No thank you, St. Loup.”

  “I was just back at the Hotel. H
ave to keep up appearances. Have to be seen being seen. You know how it is. Li-Paz was flirtatious—she must suspect something’s up.”

  “Nothing’s up, St. Loup. It’s just the same old game. I don’t know anything and nor do you.”

  “It always feels like the walls are watching you. Someone always is watching you. Microphones in the plants. Cameras in the mirrors. You had the right idea, your little holidays, your music, your what-do-you-call-’em, pilgrimages. Get away from it all. Not my idea of a good time. I’d rather be on a beach with a beautiful woman, but to each his own.”

  “Do you want my advice on your life, St. Loup?”

  “In real life I was something special, Arjun, you should have known me then. Before Shay found me. I won’t say I was always happy but I was, I was the other thing. Rich. Important. Young. Master of the universe.”

  “And the universe turned out to be bigger than you knew.”

  “Yes. Yes. And all this beauty in it; this extraordinary gift we’ve lucked into; and this is how we spend our days. Spying and scheming. Torture and murder. Doesn’t it make you sad sometimes?”

  “Constantly.”

  “Me too. Me too! I’m not a monster. You’re not the only one with feelings. It’s not our fault. It’s the situation we’re in. Sometimes I blame Shay. He should have chosen someone else. We’re the wrong sort of people for this.”

  “So let me go, St. Loup.”

  “Sometimes I blame the Mountain. All this time, living in its shadow. Always knowing that whatever we do doesn’t mean anything, because the real action’s somewhere else. Up there. It’s cruel, it’s not fair. It, it makes us smaller. We can’t grow up. I don’t care what’s up there, I really don’t, I just don’t want to be out here anymore, with the nobodies and the second-raters. Aren’t you sick of it, too? So help me. Let’s put an end to it all. You and me together, on the inside at last. Tell me what you know.”

  “I’ve heard this speech before, St. Loup.”

  “Yeah, so? How many times have I had to listen to your speeches about your bloody God?”

  “I wouldn’t help you anyway.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Nothing.”

  “What do you mean, mei What have you been telling Turnbull?”

  St. Loup and Turnbull turned on each other with satisfying inevitability. They were paranoids, obsessives; cunning but predictable. Having never been able to work out which thug belonged to which man, Arjun wasn’t entirely sure who would strike the first blow, but otherwise it happened just as quickly and surely as he had expected. As St. Loup was questioning him one morning Arjun stood, shook his head, and said: “That’s enough. All right. All right. I’ll help you. Better you than Turnbull. I’ll tell you what I saw on the Mountain …”

  And on that cue the thug dressed as a janitor lunged with a knife for the thug dressed in a cheap suit; but cheap-suit was ready, and took the blade glancingly on his arm and grappled for the other man’s throat, and the two of them went down. Presumably then the janitor was Turnbull’s man, and he had been instructed to act quickly in the event that Arjun seemed about to let valuable information slip to St. Loup. Maybe it was the other way around. Not that it mattered. St. Loup turned to look at the wrestling men on the floor, then turned back, and Arjun hit him in the head with a telephone, breaking his sunglasses and bloodying his golden curls, and took the key from his hand.

  Arjun was out into the corridor moments later, and even as Turnbull emerged from the adjoining suite and blinked in shock and put his spectacles on and fumbled for his gun, the elevator doors were already closing behind him.

  It was easy to move away from that place, out into the Meta-context. He had his hearing again and the subtle keys and paths through the city’s music were audible to him again. He found a clothes-store playing cheerful repetitive muzak and stepped through the dressing-room doors onto a distant Square full of brass bands and equestrian statues. If Turnbull and St. Loup were following him, he saw no sign of them. With a bit of luck they’d decided to kill each other instead. From the Square he went forward, and forward again, until he found a music he recognized—a funeral march down a narrow wooden street—and from there he worked his way forward again, toward Ruth Low’s city.

  It was hard to find his way back. St. Loup hadn’t been lying about that. There were fewer and fewer doors as he came closer. There were dead ends, and obstructions, and paths that curled back on themselves. He probed and pushed for hours, maybe days, insofar as days meant anything where he was. Frustrated, he sat on a stone bench by the banks of a river full of gliding swans and striking phosphorescent jellyfish, and considered giving up. He sat there long enough for more than one passerby to throw him some change.

  Was what St. Loup said about the war true? What had happened to the city? What had happened to Ruth, and Marta, and Ivy?

  If he found a way through, would he ever be able to come back?

  Was the way to his God closed to him now?

  The prudent thing to do would be to wait, to prepare, to plan and research and gather his forces. But he never was prudent.

  One of the swans came too close to a jellyfish. There was a soft splash. The bird’s long neck went limp and it turned over slowly in the water like a sinking ship.

  Arjun gathered the small change off the ground and bought himself a sandwich. He kept looking for a way through.

  The Ruined Zone-Searchlights-

  The Order of the Rope Factory-

  The New Territories-Captured

  Arjun

  NO building Stood unbroken anywhere in sight. He stood on an open waste of shattered concrete and brick—residential flat-blocks blown open by bombs. All this had happened days, maybe weeks ago—the rubble was cold. The ground was carpeted with dust and ash and plaster. Underfoot were dented pots and pans, twisted bedframes, torn sheets fluttering ghostlike and grey. Strange metallic growths sprouted, twisted and molten—exploded bombs? Beggars and blank-eyed children sat in the rubble. Collapsed chimneys lay across the edge of the Square like storm-felled trees.

  What had happened to the city?

  If there had been a war, as St. Loup had said, it was over now. This was the aftermath of war. This was defeat.

  This wasn’t Fosdyke—thank the Gods for small mercies. It was the closest place Arjun had been able to find to Fosdyke, somewhere off to the south. He was unsure of the date. It was probably weeks, at least, since the events at the Museum. It felt like a hundred years. Long enough for a civilization to fall to ruin.

  There was a kind of market nearby, in a vacant lot. Men at work. Someone had hung a great red banner over it: SOUTH bara district RUINED ZONE reclamation project. What had been homes and factories were now waste-ground, what had once been empty ground was now a center of activity. Armed men stood on watch at the corner, on the broken rooftops. There were refugee tents, and a smell of cabbage, canned beef, bad beer. Arjun went the other way. He’d had enough of armed men for the time being.

  It was night before he knew it. The sun set behind the Mountain, and for a few minutes that dark mass was limned in fire, like the light creeping around the edge of a locked door. The clouds around the Mountain’s peak seemed to blaze. Then the city was plunged into moonlight. The sky was full of sullen black clouds; the Mountain was only an absence of stars.

  Something rose from the Mountain and approached.

  At first they were specks, and Arjun thought perhaps they were clouds. Then, adjusting his sense of perspective, he thought they were birds—their progress was too rapid and too purposeful to be clouds. There were at least a dozen of them. As they approached the city they grew farther apart from each other, so that it seemed that they were setting out on divergent courses, like the spokes of a wheel, like the thorns of a crown. If that were the case, some of them must have been very far away, and therefore very large; not birds, then. Dragons, or Rocs, or some other exotic creature from remote Ages of the city?

  Some
of them were coming closer and he began to make out their shape; something rounded and immense that made him think of whales.

  The slow outward radiation continued. Then all of the dark shapes at once began to sparkle like stars.

  As the nearest shapes came closer, Arjun realized that there was a column of light depending from each of them, flickering down on the ruins below. Searchlights. He began to get nervous.

  The first explosion sounded a couple of miles away. There was a flash of red flame and a distant thump. In what seemed the same instant the searchlight passed over his little corner of the ruins and everything in the world was suddenly blindingly bright like bleached bone. He threw himself to the ground and covered his head, but the light passed on. There was an explosion nearby and the sound of a building sliding into wreckage, but Arjun was untouched.

  As the shape in the sky passed he saw it: an airship.

  An airship of unfamiliar design. He recalled the Thunderer, and indeed the airships of another half-dozen eras: all of them had been beautiful things, winged or sailed in one way or another, elegantly curved, brightly painted. Everywhere else in the city, flying things were sacred things. But these were almost willfully ugly—soulless and functional. A long grey balloon like a blunted or spent bullet, from which something like a cage hung.

  Here and there a crackle of distant gunfire and flashes answered the airships. They drifted on implacably. Serene, untouchable, uncaring.

  After a while it was over. The airships turned back, closing in like the fingers of a fist. Their lights went out and they vanished into the shadows of the Mountain.

  In all his years wandering the city Arjun had never seen anything like it. The Mountain was always there in the far distance; he’d never seen it reach out… He felt violated. It was unnatural. The fact of contact scared him worse than the bombs. What had they done?